Chapter Text
The boy got a seat in the front of the Church. Not all the way in the choir, where the coffin was and the grey-haired men in the red dresses, but almost directly in front of the preacher. He’d rather sit in the back; he was kicking his legs in the air, but the lady from the office kept telling him not to do that. Do you see others kicking their legs in the air like that? She said gently, and she gestured to the rest of the front row. They are all sitting still, you see? If he’d sat in the back, he could have kicked his legs; no one would have noticed it then.
He couldn’t see inside the coffin from where he sat anyway, it was too far away and he was not tall enough. Sometime during the service he even started to wonder if there was anyone inside, because it seemed strange to him that they’d take your body after you died and put you in a church like that, with all these people. Dying was kind of like sleeping, they’d told him, so the coffin must kind of be like a bed – and yet he’d never seen this many people standing around in anyone’s bedroom. They would never fit in his, he knew that for sure.
The preacher was done with his speech. He gave a sad look at the coffin as if it wasn’t just a box of wood, and then the choir stepped forward. They produced a heavenly sound, like someone had peeled all the paintings of angels off the walls of the cathedral and told them to sing. They didn’t look much like angels, though; their white, shapeless dresses looked weird. He always got a dress like that when he was at the hairdresser’s, but they never told him to sing.
The lady told him to stop kicking his legs again, but this time she put her hand on his legs to make them stop. Her hand was cold and he shivered.
He didn’t know anyone in the cathedral, not even her. Her name was Meredith and she was a nun, but she wasn’t wearing nun’s clothes, just a silver cross around her neck. She said she came from an office, so he wasn’t sure if she really was a nun. She also said she would look after him for a little while, and she never stopped saying that it would all be alright. He didn’t trust her a whole lot. Maybe if she’d worn the same clothes nuns wore, he would.
There were some men in the front that he thought he’d seen before, but they all wore the same red dress and the same solemn expression, which made it hard to tell them apart. He didn’t even recognize the cathedral, while he had been there many times before; it was so full now that he couldn’t even see the wooden confessional that always stood on the far left.
He did recognize the tall man and the pretty lady with the blonde hair. The tall man sat in the front too, in the left corner where the confessional should have been; next to him there was one of those men in the red dresses, but the man was wearing a black suit. The pretty lady with the blond hair was on the other side, standing in between a younger man with light brown hair and an older one with black-and-white hair, who was holding a shiny silvery white cane. There was a veil draped over her beautiful blonde hair, but the boy still liked to look at her best.
The tall man liked to look at her, too, he noticed. The man would close his eyes sometimes, or direct them to the ceiling, but they would always land back on her. Even when the singing was over, and the talking was over, and everyone gathered around the wooden box to put the lid on and lift it on their shoulders, he was looking at her.
The boy liked to watch the tall man watch the pretty lady, because he’d rather not watch the wooden box. The men lifted it as if it were incredibly heavy, which made him angry. He thought they were probably pretending; they didn’t really mean it, just like they didn’t really mean it when they made sad faces at the box.
The boy wanted to stay behind in the cathedral, kick his feet and then maybe go to the tall man. He would feel better when he was around the tall man. Sister Meredith wasn’t unkind, but she didn’t seem like she was a part of his life. He remembered the tall man in the empty cathedral, how he’d fought with the lady. The boy had been scared when he watched the tall man coming down the aisle towards him, but then he’d seen his wet eyes. God had made him cry, the tall man had told him, and the boy had believed him because he recognized pain.
He wanted to take the tall man’s hand or hide in the confessional that had to be around somewhere; they must have moved it. The lady told him he had to follow the procession with the coffin. He said he didn’t want to, but she made him walk anyway. When he looked over his shoulder, he couldn’t see the tall man anymore, and the lady with the veil was gone from her place, too, as if they had never been there.
The boy cried then, and Sister Meredith put a hand on his black curls to soothe him; but he was still alone.